


Skin and Feathers

by Brotherwife (AnamaryArmygram)



Category: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019)
Genre: Alternate Hollywood History, Alternate Universe - Wings, Crack Treated Seriously, Fantastic Racism, Gen, I'm in love with my own worldbuilding, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempt, Introspection, Light Angst, Movie References, No Plot, Pregnancy, Representation, TV references, Vignettes, dark!Cliff Booth, mixed marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-20 10:36:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20226454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnamaryArmygram/pseuds/Brotherwife
Summary: Three vignettes in a universe where everyone has wings.





	1. Rick

_Actors are required to do a lot of dangerous stuff. Say Jake Cahill gets shot out of the air._

_Now, can I take a dive out of midair? Yes, I can. Yes, I have._

_But say I land wrong and I twist my ankle or I break off a few too many feathers. Well, that can put an undue burden on production, ’cause now maybe I can’t work for a week. So Cliff here is meant to help carry the load._

If you look at that interview, they set us up so we were kind of backlit and they stuck Cliff in a shadow. They gave him direction, too, told him to fold his wings back extra tight so the viewers at home couldn’t get a good look at them. Which meant I had to fold mine back extra tight, too, so it wouldn’t be so obvious that was what they were doing. 

That merkin he put together? Looked great when he was doing his thing. When he was sitting still, it looked like shit. 

A batman doing stunts for a birdman isn’t too common nowadays. Go back ten, fifteen years and a team like that was literally unheard of. Cliff and me, we might’ve been the first. 

The funny thing is, batmen make great stuntmen. Their wings articulate more, you know? Gives ’em more control. They’ve been subbing for bat actors since the movies began. Joe Yrigoyen, who did some of the stuntwork for the bad guys on _Bounty Law_, told me about the chariot race in _Ben-Hur_. One of the reasons it worked so well, that nobody thinks about, is that six of the nine charioteers were played by batmen, and the two birdmen who weren’t Charlton Heston were also the first two to get killed. That ups the stakes psychologically, of course, because now he’s the only feathers on the field, and even if you didn’t think you noticed that, it still makes it feel like it’s him against the world. So there’s that. But then also, it clears the way for all those bat stuntmen to strut their stuff. 

But the idea of putting a feather wig on some guy’s skinwings and getting that extra advantage for – well, for the kind of roles that get played by birdmen? That was a long time coming, and I do wonder about that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Joe Yrigoyen was a real person. He was Stephen Boyd's stunt double in _Ben-Hur_, appeared in a lot of westerns (though not many TV shows, actually), kept working well into his sixties, and died in 1998.
> 
> The knowledge, opinions, and anatomy I've attributed to him are entirely made-up.


	2. Cliff

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This part takes place in March 1967. I'm not one hundred percent sure that it's compatible with the canon timeline, but I did my best.

As soon as he stepped into the trailer, Cliff Booth peeled off his t-shirt. He squeezed his wings small and shimmied a little to get out of the slightly-too-tight wingholes, then caught the falling garment on the end of his right wing and flung it into the corner without looking. Brandy watched patiently all the while. 

Cliff wasn’t usually quite that eager to get his shirt off. The weather wasn’t unusually warm. But Rick had invited him in for a couple of St. Patrick’s Day drinks before letting him go for the night, and Rick’s idea of a St. Patrick’s Day drink was very boozy and very sweet. That was a combination that made Cliff sweat. 

All that sugar had killed his appetite, too, so he wasn’t going to bother with dinner. But he decided to putter around in the kitchen for a few minutes before giving Brandy her food. She was a very well-trained dog, and she sure hadn’t gotten that way by being spoiled. So Cliff killed time, rinsing out a couple of glasses and shifting things around in the fridge. 

He flexed his wings a little as he worked. He still had some bruises from a shoot last week, livid mottling on the thin-stretched, slightly tanned skin. 

Finally it was Brandy’s mealtime. He emptied a couple of cans of food into her bowl. She waited, shaking a little with anticipation, until he gave the signal. 

He was teaching her something that was just as important for mean dogs as it was for men: self-control. Lose that for just a second – if it was the wrong second – and your world could end. 

He’d been there plenty of times when Rick had lost control, and once – when Rick was, as he too often was, despondent over losing a coveted part – Cliff had actually saved him from making an irrevocable bad decision. 

Cliff had made an irrevocable bad decision of his own, once. There’d been no one there to save him from _that_. (Billie herself could have prevented it, maybe, just by giving her tongue a rest. But that wasn’t her way.) 

He’d been presumptuous enough to marry a woman with feathers. She’d lowered herself enough to marry a man with skinwings. A small, self-loathing part of him thought that they both deserved what they’d got. 

Of course, having the same kind of wings as four-fifths of villains in comic books and movies and TV meant that even if he’d been innocent and able to prove it, a lot of people wouldn’t have cared. 

Enough thinking: it was time for _Time Tunnel_. (He'd just missed _The Green Hornet_, but that didn't seem like any great loss.) Cliff popped open a beer and skritchled Brandy as our square-jawed, feather-backed, mysteriously sweaty heroes were flung back to – where and when? Arthurian Britain this time around. 

Lee Meriwether had skinwings and she did all right for herself. Dr. Ann MacGregor was a sympathetic character. Didn’t get to fall in love or anything, stuck back in Mission Control with a bunch of mostly feathered old guys – but still, sympathetic. That was _something_, right?


	3. Sharon

Pretty soon everybody will be able to see she’s pregnant. Her body will change. Her wardrobe will change. And then her whole life will change. 

But for now, on this very sunny, extremely southern California day, it’s still her secret. 

Well… hers, her husband’s, and her obstetrician’s. According to the latter, the baby is about half an inch long by now and should already have hands, feet, and wingbuds. There’s still no way to tell whether it’s a boy or a girl, or which kind of wings it will have. 

The eternal question: Who will the baby take after? 

Sharon is proud of her wings. They’re a little larger than you’d expect for someone her height – that was one of the things that got her into modeling – and the feathers are straight white, without that fringe of black tips like most people have.

She doesn’t know how she’d feel if she’d been born with skinwings, but she knows her life would have been a little less charmed. A batgirl _can_ be sexy, sure, but she has to work twice as hard. 

A bat_boy_, on the other hand… 

Roman’s wings are wonderful. Strong-fingered, but not grotesquely muscly. Translucent in strong light, with the red-purple capillaries showing through. Skin a little swarthier than the rest of him, maybe just from too much sun. Completely hairless. She can’t lie to herself: they’re a big part of his appeal. 

(And Jay’s perfectly nice, exceptionally well-groomed feathers are a big part of why he and Sharon are just friends.) 

These kinds of marriages aren’t unheard of. Sharon’s own great-grandmother had skinwings, and the family was never ashamed. 

Anyway, things are changing. Just look at Batman, the hero who terrorizes criminals by hiding his feathers under a false skin. That used to be strong stuff, the kind of thing that gave comic books an unsavory reputation. But something happened in the transition to television, and now it’s a colorful comedy. Maybe in twenty years the character will be obsolete. 

In twenty years, the baby will be out of high school. What kind of world will he, or she, be stepping into? 

There’s a long stretch of unoccupied sidewalk ahead. Sharon, knowing that she might be grounded as her pregnancy progresses, seizes the chance. She takes a running start, pumps her wings a couple of times, and soars into the sky above L.A.


End file.
